Why Can’t I View My Power BI Content Pack?

I had a call with a customer this morning discussing different ways to publish Power BI content and how to share Power BI datasets, reports, and dashboards. A colleague, Patrick Leblanc (b|t), and I had a discussion about this, as well, and Patrick confirmed that this was a common challenge that his customers have faced. I thought I’d share what Patrick and I learned.

The Set Up

So here’s the set up which lead to the conundrum. My user is an admin in two Power BI Group Workspaces. We’ll call the two workspaces DevTest and Production. I’ve published a dataset, report, and created a dashboard in the DevTest Group Workspace and I want to share that content with other users in the Production workspace. This set up allows me to publish my content to the DevTest workspace for Q/A and then use the Content Pack to roll out the updated reports to the other workspaces.

I first published the dataset and report and created the dashboard in the DevTest workspace, as you can see here.

I then created the Organizational Content Pack using the content I published to the DevTest workspace. For sharing purposes, I granted access to the Content Pack to my close friend, Clark Kent a.k.a. Super Man.

After sharing the content pack with Clark Kent, I logged in to Power BI as Clark Kent and navigated to the Production Group Workspace. Clark Kent is an Admin in the Production Group Workspace, which you can see here.

The Problem

Here’s where I run into the shenanigans. While logged in as Clark Kent, I clicked Get Data and selected My organization. But the Content Pack is nowhere to be found! Another Content Pack is there, but the one I just shared is not visible.

What’s the solution?

The Solution

The solution to this problem resides in who the Content Pack is shared with and who is a member of the Production Group Workspace. If you remember, the Content Pack was shared with Clark Kent and Clark Kent alone. Bruce Wayne is also a member of the Production Group Workspace. But because I did not grant access to the content pack, the content pack cannot be added to the Group Workspace if the content pack is not explicitly shared with the group.

To correct this issue, I logged back in as the admin of the DevTest Group Workspace and edited the Content Pack to be shared specifically with the Production Group Workspace, as seen here.

Now that the Content Pack has been shared with the Group, I can then successfully add the Content Pack to the Production Group Workspace so that Clark Kent and the other members of the Production workspace will have access to my Power BI content.

So the moral of the story here is that if you need to share a Content Pack with a Group Workspace, the Content Pack must explicitly be shared with the Group Workspace.

Resources

I hope you found this helpful and I hope you also learned something. Check out the following resources if you have more questions about Content Packs or Group Workspace.